NO STOLEN ELECTIONS! www.Nov3.US http://www.Nov3.US/
27 October 2004 First Action Notice: As the election closes in there is mounting evidence that the outcome may not be immediately clear. A wide range of voter fraud may emerge that will require intense work at the local level to organize direct actions to seek remedies. Fortunately there are already thousands of people mobilized in existing election protection efforts to insure that every vote is counted on November 2nd, but they will need more support. Thatıs why 15,000 people have already signed the No Stolen Elections pledge. If there is election fraud, we are committed to take action to ensure that every vote is counted in the days following November 2nd. Late on election night, November 2nd, you and everyone else who signed the pledge (sign the pledge here: http://www.Nov3.US/) will receive an Urgent Response Network email notice informing you of whether the Fair Elections Advisory Council has found evidence of significant fraud impacting the outcome of the election. This notice will also appearon the website. In the meantime, the No Stolen Elections campaign is well underway, and our website is constantly being updated to provide you with information, suggestions, contacts, and other resources to help you follow up on your pledge to defend voting rights. Here is what you can do right now: 1. GET READY Prepare Your Local Response - Go to the website and click on "Directory of Local Actions," and see if someone in your community has already organized a rally, public meeting, or other event for November 3rd, and beyond. If so, please contact them and help them out. If not, please take steps to organize such an event, and please post the details about it on the website. Click on "What You Can Do" for tips and suggestions for your local organizing, and for a PDF poster you can download for local use. Read Up - Go to the website and click on "Stolen Election Deja Vu" to read an excellent article by Steve Cobble which details the kinds of abuses the Fair Elections Advisory Council will be looking out for on November 2nd. Click on "Action Framework" to read a document which will provide you with an overall guide regarding how to prepare for November 3rd, and for what may happen in the weeks and months following a stolen election. Get Text Messaging - One way we'll get the word out on November 2nd will be via text messaging. Please sign up to receive the word via your cell phone. Simply: (1) Go to http://www.txtmob.com, (2) Create an account (click on login), (3) Click on Join More Groups, and (4) Select NOV3. 2. SPREAD THE WORD - Tell everyone about it! Go to the website and click on "Spread the Word." Use the form that is there to send out a letter to everyone you know asking them to join you in signing the pledge. On that same "Spread the Word" page there is also a banner at the bottom. Click on that to see an array of banners and buttons you can add to your website as links to the No Stolen Elections campaign. 3. CONTRIBUTE - Go to the website and click on "Contribute!" to make a contribution to the No Stolen Elections campaign. For the timebeing, the costs of coordinating this campaign are limited to field support, web, communications costs. But we expect that if Urgent Response Network is mobilized, costs will increase significantly. We need to be prepared. Please contribute today. 4. UPDATES - Watch the website for regular updates. Recent updates have included the Fair Elections Advisory Council, No Stolen Elections Deja Vu, What You Can Do, the Action Framework, new signatories to the pledge, links to election protection groups on the "About Us" page, and many other lesser updates. Look for at least one more email update before election day. NO STOLEN ELECTIONS! http://www.Nov3.US "This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." ~ Frederick Douglass, 1857 ----------- GETTING PHYSICAL by Tom Hayden Not since the 1930s have the labor, civil rights and peace movements been this unified in a presidential campaign, and almost never before have the raw realities of power been so flagrantly revealed behind the showcasing of democracy American-style. It will get worse in the days ahead. Many Americans will have to push their way through the resistance of Republican operatives seeking to obstruct the right to vote. I predict it will get physical. Remember the white riot staged by Republican congressional staffers, many of them flown in on Enron jets, to shut down the Florida vote count in 2000? Remember the Democratic leadership cautioning Rev. Jesse Jackson not to lead militant demonstrations that month? Remember the pressure coming from the highest levels to achieve "closure" and "stability" rather than prolong the battle over who won Florida? The Republicans learned all over that November that force and intimidation work. It's happening all over again. The US "Federal Election Assistance Commission" admits they lack 500,000 trained poll workers for Tuesday. A top Republican in Michigan opines that victory depends on how many black votes can be suppressed. Companies like Diebold control millions of electronically-cast votes without oversight. The Ohio Republicans wanted voter applications to be on paper with holiday-card thickness. South Dakota Republicans work to stop the Pine Ridge Oglala from turning out. The Pentagon political machine is mobilizing the overseas military vote. The purging of hundreds of thousands of ex-felons continues in state after state. And Florida is once again, well, Florida. This time elements of the Democratic coalition are prepared to fight back, unlike 2000. New York Times editorials make America begin to seem like a banana republic. Thousands of activists have registered up to 700,000 new voters in Ohio. The Florida turnout is projected at 75 percent. It may be the largest voter drive in progressive history. If Kerry wins, it will be due in large part to these new voters. Republicans know that victory depends on impeding turnout, that the important thing is to interrogate people of color, the elderly and students, drive them away from the polls by any means necessary, drown the complaints with a drumbeat about whiners, and leave it to the courts. This is a moment of truth. It has been an ideological maxim for many on the Left that the vote is meaningless, a diversionary reform at most. But if the Republicans are willing to use any means to suppress the vote, especially among people of color, how can any progressive person be indifferent any longer? The fact is that systematic efforts are underway to repeal the right to vote for thousands, even millions, of Americans whose ancestors fought and secured it, or so we are taught to believe. Let us concede the point that the vote has been hollowed out by the power of money, the seduction of personality, the oligarchical arrangement of the parties, the growth of clandestine decision-making. But the very effort to render the franchise meaningless reveals its potential for changing the social order. The promise that every person is equal in the ballot box is feared as a precedent that could get out of hand in a society founded on so much inequality. Democracy ultimately becomes contagious, excessive, to conservative thinkers like Harvard's Samuel Huntington. At the very bottom of things is the fact that the pure marketplace of neo-conservative dreams cannot coexist alongside the universal franchise. It is an interference in free markets, a potential restraint on trade. It is to be controlled as a privilege, never conceded as a right. In the unfolding confrontation, millions of Americans are learning the profound lesson that the right to vote is not secure, that plans to steal elections are made at the highest levels of authority. It is a radicalizing lesson, not a seduction into the smoke and mirrors of America's fictitious pluralism. On Tuesday at least, the traditions of civil disobedience and electoral politics may converge. What are Democrats going to do if long lines of voters are blocked? E-mail John Ashcroft? Are newly-politicized protestors going to forget about their confrontational tactics for the day, or use them against the Republican bullies? What are trade unionists supposed to do when a Republican pushes or punches someone trying to vote? What are defenders of democracy to do when the whole world is watching Republicans approach the election like a seizure of power? What will happen when it's too late for the lawyers and the foul deed is done again? If Republicans stand in the way of democracy Tuesday like reincarnations of old George Wallace or Ross Barnett, it should be time for the movement to say once again: move on over or we'll move on over you.
